Afterschool Pleiades – 放課後のプレアデス (Houkago no Pleiades)
Hmm, well at least it looked pretty. I was wondering what the Gainax and Subaru (the carmaker) collaboration would be, but I didn’t think it would be a series of four mini-ovas that are to be aired on Youtube. That being said, with the entire story being told within the span of 19 minutes (this is including the credits) there’s no way you could expect an exceptional story of any sort. I don’t quite know what Gainax was thinking, but the art looked rather nice, and there was some decent music. Aside from that, though, the characters are pretty run of the mill average and the story is very uninspiring.
Admittingly, Gainax did experiment a little bit with the ideas in this show with the stars and all. Even so, the story was rather run of the mill typical “main girl gets thrown into a situation and becomes a magical girl and saves the day”. We’ve already seen this type of stuff before, but I guess you can’t really expect much from such a short little series. There is a little bit of drama in there, but it feels very forced and awkward at times, not to mention the conflict gets resolved rather quickly without much buildup.
The visuals were rather nice though. Animation may not have been perfect, but the artwork itself was very nice looking. The action scenes were okay too, though they were very short as well. You could tell they put a bit of effort into character designs as well, but the characters themselves were rather generic. I guess the cast just didn’t have enough screentime to get properly fleshed out. The music wasn’t terrible, but it doesn’t really fit in with the show itself too well.
Honestly, there isn’t much else to say about this show. I mean, I don’t quite know why in the world Subaru and Gainax decided to make a show like this, especially with some weird quirks like the magical brooms making an engine’s “Vroom” sound, and them collecting parts for some magical giant “engine”. Houkago no Pleiades was entertaining, but in a weird “questioning every aspect of the show” way; I guess this could be an indication of a full blown series, though if it’s similar to this, I wouldn’t know what to expect.
Animation/Art: 8.0/10
Music: 8.0/10
Characters: 7.0/10
Story/setting: 6.0/10
Overall Enjoyment: 7.1/10
Screenshots, ED theme, and JP streams of the episodes are later in the post.
Distant Paradise 